Daily Archives: December 7, 2013

Minnesota, Weather +Climate

Our Time

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Samhain                                                                    Winter Moon

A sickle moon, 7 inches of snow, still fresh, -11 on the weather system’s display.  Yes. There is a purity in a northern winter, a clarity and a straight-forwardness that I sought out when I moved 44 years ago to Appleton, Wisconsin.  Indiana winters could never decide on cold or chill, snow or slush, rain or ice.  Walking in January with wet feet through a crunchy mush of water.  Well, that was the nadir.

That first winter, 1969, we had several feet of snow and the temperature got down to -20 and stayed there.  That was what I wanted, a season not afraid to declare its intentions, to arrive and stay present until time to give way to spring.  Since then I’ve lived through many notable winters and I’ve enjoyed all of them.

The motor vehicle has been my only source of displeasure.  Streets too narrow, snow and ice too built up, wheels spinning, starters whining and clicking.  Speeds well beyond what physics says makes sense.  Snowshoes.  Yes.  Sorels.  Yes.  Cross-country skis.  Yes.  Engines and tires and heavy metal.  No.

Other than that.  What can beat a several day snowstorm with flakes drifting, then coming in on the slant, drifting again.  Building up, caressing the landscape until it changes into something altogether new.  A newness with curves and sweeps and slopes and fewer barriers and boundaries.  And blizzards with the snow coming across the desert expanses like the fabled sand storms of the Sahara.

Even the danger of it.  It’s possible to lose your way here in a serious storm, wander off into a field, say, while only 50 feet from home.  It happens, not every winter, but often. People leave their cars, try to make it to safety.  The cold can kill.  -11, which it is right now, is far below survivability for the human body.  Trips have a somber side to them, a reasonable caution is necessary.

This is the human animal outside its geographic bounds.  We’re not polar bears or even bunnies like I photographed the other afternoon.  We’re creatures of the warmer regions where our hairless bodies can thrive with no clothing.  None at all.  Imagine being a bushman faced with a Minnesota winter night.  Or a native American or a pioneer for that matter.

Winter is why we don’t have to keep Minnesota for Minnesotans.  In Colorado there are license plates that read Colorado native.  I’m sure they’re not, really, but I understand. They don’t want to share.  Hawai’i doesn’t encourage immigration either and Portland has a don’t move here campaign.

Our quality of life meets and exceeds all three places but we have this northern temperate climate winter and if you don’t want to live here, it weeds you out.  Sends you packing for sunnier places.  And that’s ok.  Makes sure if you’re here, for the most part, you’re here because you want to be.

Quotes

the written word perseveres

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“Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.”
— Herman Melville
“A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.”
— Herman Melville
“An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.”
— Herman Melville
“Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.”
— Winston Churchill
“Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.”
— Honoré de Balzac
“Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.”
— Honoré de Balzac
“Music appeals to the heart, whereas writing is addressed to the intellect; it communicates ideas directly, like perfume.”
— Honoré de Balzac
“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
— James Joyce
“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to create life out of life.”
— James Joyce
“This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By epiphany — a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture, or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that the themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.”
— James Joyce
“Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.”
— Confucius
“Learn as though you would never be able to master it: Hold it as though you would be in fear if loosing it.”
— Confucius
“It is only the wisest and the very stupidest who cannot change.”
— Confucius
“The soul can become a reality again only when each of us has the courage to take it as the first reality in our own lives, to stand for it and not just “believe” in it.”
— James Hillman
“The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder.”
— James Hillman
“Happiness ain’t a thing in itself — it’s only a contrast with something that ain’t pleasant…. And so, as soon as the novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain’t happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh.”
— Mark Twain
“Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this it the ideal life.”
— Mark Twain
“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
“We’re not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
“We are all what we pretend to be, so, we had better be very careful what we pretend.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”
— Henry Miller

 

 

Humanities, World History

Out of Eden

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Samhain                                                             Winter Moon

Friend Mark Odegard mentioned the website Out of Eden Walk.  It is now listed among my links under the category Ancient of Trails.  Here’s the map showing the route for this seven year jaunt.  The website is worth seeing.

“If you want to walk fast, walk alone. If you want to walk far, walk together.” — African proverb

 

Great Work

Holding the reins for the four horsemen? Humanity

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Samhain                                                                   Winter Moon

“Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.”

H.G. Wells

I’ve seen several positive developments in the war against the war on Mother Earth. 11,000+ Minnesotans asked the Public Utility Commission to shut down the Sherco coal-fired electrical generation plants.

Another 12,000 have questioned the optimistic analysis of the Polymet Corporation in their Environmental Impact Statement for a copper-nickel mine on the border of the Boundary Waters Wilderness.  They claim to have a technology that will do what no other sulfide mine in the world, ever, has done:  control sulfuric acid runoff from mine-tailings.  Prove it first makes sense to me.  Pay for the probability of failure up front with a bond equal to the amount the state calculates will be necessary to contain the tailings also makes sense to me.  Meet these two criteria then we can talk.

There is, too, an article in the Economist that suggests large corporations expect to pay a carbon tax and will do so willingly.  This is good news.

Here’s the link to H.G. Wells.  If we don’t do these things, and the items mentioned here are minimums and much, much more will be required of us, it is not the earth that will suffer.  The natural world changes.  That’s what it does.  It always changes.  If we accelerate change in a particular direction, then it is not the planet but humanity that is at peril.  The risk in all these matters is the extinction of the human race.

This may be the apocalypse so often bruited as caused by an angry god.  The hand holding the reins for the four horsemen is not divine, it is all too human.